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API design is important with a project that depends on an ecosystem of things and where incompatibilities are big issues.
Good thing to put clean API design over quick and dirty implementation.

This coupled with WiFi Direct and other recent advantages can really make things very convenient and per formant.

You could buy a tablet and a high end gaming pc. Route the image from the high end gaming pc to the tablet and the inputs to the high end gaming pc.
The convenience of a tablet paired with the performance of a desktop pc, awesome.

MiracleCast is an implementation of Miracast, which is a standard supported by many TVs, smartphones, tablets, and specialized stand-alone HDMI dongles. Ideally any device that supports Miracast, which is a lot, should support MiracleCast.

The only problem is that there are a lot of slightly different Miracast devices that are not fully compatible, but it sounds like the devs are aware of this and are planning to make it compatible with as many devices as possible.

And, as I said, Miracast is only spec'd for transport over WiFi Direct... which my desktop can't speak.

I'm pissed because, if I want to use it with an off-the-shelf TV or wireless display, I'm probably either going to have to pay extra for a RasPi to receive the MiracleCast stream over wired Ethernet or pay extra for a big bag of WiFi Direct dongles for all the PCs in the house that want to stream to the TV.

(Now you start to see why I see a RasPi and the non-Miracast TVs people will start tossing in electronics recycling bins as a better option. One RasPi is probably cheaper than four WiFi Direct dongles and I don't have to worry about the WiFi Direct fighting with the locked-down 802.11g for spectrum.)

And, as I said, Miracast is only spec'd for transport over WiFi Direct... which my desktop can't speak.

I'm pissed because, if I want to use it with an off-the-shelf TV or wireless display, I'm probably either going to have to pay extra for a RasPi to receive the MiracleCast stream over wired Ethernet or pay extra for a big bag of WiFi Direct dongles for all the PCs in the house that want to stream to the TV.

(Now you start to see why I see a RasPi and the non-Miracast TVs people will start tossing in electronics recycling bins as a better option. One RasPi is probably cheaper than four WiFi Direct dongles and I don't have to worry about the WiFi Direct fighting with the locked-down 802.11g for spectrum.)

I agree its stupid to require wifi direct, it should definitely work with at least point to point ethernet. But it is understandable why the standard doesn't allow arbitrary local transports, and I can't imagine it would be hard for the devs to just add non-direct streaming via local ip or hostname as well. But most consumer routers would choke trying to maintain low latency two way wifi signaling at bandwidths of 20MB/s for reasonable quality and framerate.

And, as I said, Miracast is only spec'd for transport over WiFi Direct... which my desktop can't speak.

WiFi Direct isn't a special different type of Wifi, it's using WiFi to directly talk between devices, instead of through a common access point.

Originally Posted by ssokolow

and I don't have to worry about the WiFi Direct fighting with the locked-down 802.11g for spectrum.

Then have your display devices talk to each other over the 5GHz spectrum.
Most of the current Wifi enabled devices are 802.11n and support dual band any way.
And the video stream will definitely benefit from the extra bandwidth offered by this standard.

Originally Posted by ssokolow

I'm pissed because, if I want to use it with an off-the-shelf TV or wireless display, I'm probably either going to have to pay extra for a RasPi to receive the MiracleCast stream over wired Ethernet or pay extra for a big bag of WiFi Direct dongles for all the PCs in the house that want to stream to the TV.

Your use is not the typical type of usage for which MiraCast was invented.

The idea is that nowadays, lots of gizmos come with hi-speed wireless (802.11n dual band, most of the time), including laptops, including small portable devices like tablets, smartphones.
Even TV come with WiFi (to stream video online, etc. some even have built-in skype clients)
So why fumbling around with physical HDMI or MHL cables, when you could send the Video stream over wireless ?

(Then later came the idea of also having the set-top box/receiver in a convenient place in your living room, and the screen attached on the wall, without needing to use 10m cables in between).

So the main idea behind MiraCast is to use already existing WiFi capabilites in the portable devies and in the TV.

Of course, i you have only a fixed-cable network at home, you're not exactly what they planned Miracast.
(Saddly, given the current trend of absolutely everything having WiFi, even big clunky device where wired networking would be more logical, I doubt that Micracast developer and TV maker will do the extra work to also standardise a "Wired Miracast" variant. HMDI and MHL already pay a role of wired connection in their scenarios)

WiFi Direct isn't a special different type of Wifi, it's using WiFi to directly talk between devices, instead of through a common access point.

Then have your display devices talk to each other over the 5GHz spectrum.
Most of the current Wifi enabled devices are 802.11n and support dual band any way.
And the video stream will definitely benefit from the extra bandwidth offered by this standard.

Your use is not the typical type of usage for which MiraCast was invented.

The idea is that nowadays, lots of gizmos come with hi-speed wireless (802.11n dual band, most of the time), including laptops, including small portable devices like tablets, smartphones.
Even TV come with WiFi (to stream video online, etc. some even have built-in skype clients)
So why fumbling around with physical HDMI or MHL cables, when you could send the Video stream over wireless ?

(Then later came the idea of also having the set-top box/receiver in a convenient place in your living room, and the screen attached on the wall, without needing to use 10m cables in between).

So the main idea behind MiraCast is to use already existing WiFi capabilites in the portable devies and in the TV.

Of course, i you have only a fixed-cable network at home, you're not exactly what they planned Miracast.
(Saddly, given the current trend of absolutely everything having WiFi, even big clunky device where wired networking would be more logical, I doubt that Micracast developer and TV maker will do the extra work to also standardise a "Wired Miracast" variant. HMDI and MHL already pay a role of wired connection in their scenarios)

But "wired Miracast" would be great. A lot of the modern gripes around remote desktops stem from RFB and VNC using framebuffers rather than rapid encode video codecs to stream the screen, so you get awful framerates, huge bandwidth delays, and lag, just to get a "perfect" image. And configuring either of those into a video streaming mode, when available, is a huge pain in the ass and you have to verify both client and server support it.

And in some ways you don't even want streaming remote desktop, you just want virtual streaming of screens in general. The IO of a keyboard and mouse over network is trivial compared to a standard decodable fast encode and decode small enough to transport over consumer networking video infrastructure that we just don't have in place anywhere, although I'd like to see RTSP adoption take off for more of that.

WiFi Direct isn't a special different type of Wifi, it's using WiFi to directly talk between devices, instead of through a common access point.

Not strictly true. WiFi direct is a specific standard for a particular type of wifi connection. It combines a variant of the ad-hoc WiFi networking standard (which networkmanager supports) with a variant of WiFi protected setup standard (which networkmanager does NOT support) to establish a new type of direct connection. Having a device that supports WiFi does not necessarily mean it supports WiFi direct, and in fact as far as I am aware no user-facing Linux network stacks support it yet.